Gaza: the foggy view of propaganda through the media lens

On Saturday night the television news headlines carried two strangely incompatible stories. 

First, there was footage of a mighty force bombing terrorists who were threatening innocent civilians; then they showed video of people protesting against another mighty force, also bombing terrorists threatening innocent civilians. 

With tens of thousands of women and children dying under attack from ISIS in Northern Iraq, you’d think there’d be plenty of reason to hit the streets. I'd understand if there were petitioners outside every Arab embassy demanding action to curb the terrorists that are causing such turbulence and carnage. But the slogan-chanters marching through London with their Socialist Worker-supplied banners, the well-spoken students with brand new black and white Arafat scarves, the righteous politicians demanding sanctions and retribution, didn't mention the plight of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis; they were targeting the democratic state of Israel.

Jeremy Clarkson and the 'N'-word

Joanna was confused. 


“So why did Jeremy Clarkson use the ‘N’-word in ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Moe’?” she asked innocently. 

Being American, my wife was brought up in a world where the only creatures ever caught by the toe were tigers. 

Jo is a modern woman, born in 1970. At school in Los Angeles, they always used tigers in this playground rhyme. My own children used tigers too, and my eldest is 32. They would no more consider using the ‘N’-word in a sentence than they would use the “C”-word in front of their parents. 

The ‘N’-word was part of an earlier generation. Mine, and Clarkson’s.

3 - not quite the magic number

The proposed demise of BBC3 has been greeted by howls of rage from its well-remunerated stars (like Jack Whitehall and Russell Kane) and almost complete indifference by the licence payers. 

By yesterday only 150,000 had signed an online petition against the axing, which is about the number that watch the live transmission of the average show, against the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on the network so far. 

Since the network first launched, younger viewers have stubbornly ignored the broadcaster’s efforts to reach them. Which is no fault of BBC3, of course, because everyone knows that the majority of young people find television utterly irrelevant to their lives. 

The next hot thing

Sunny Sunday mornings are always special. 

A leisurely soft boiled egg with soldiers lying lazily beside a frothing cappuccino, my computer open at a blank page, ready for the weekly update on my world. It’s my favourite moment of the week. Except that instead of a view of my frosted garden, I’m looking at the Empire State building glowing in the sunlight of a New York midtown skyline. 

Outside my hotel here in Brooklyn, the streets are still silent, no sign of life apart from a few tracksuits in the park jogging guilt into my brain as I order another round of buttery toast. 

I only arrived last night, and this afternoon I’ll be back in the care of British Airways, 14 hours of my weekend lost on a plane. It’s a long way to come for one meeting, but that’s the strange world of television. You work away at a project for months, and then suddenly somebody says they’ll meet you, but only next Saturday, and off you fly. Literally.

Doggie Doos and Don'ts

 
I think the fairy period of Izzy’s life may have peaked. 

Not that she’s discarded them yet. In fact, as I write this, she’s sitting on the floor building a new fairy house. It’s a shoebox decorated with glitter and nail varnish (which I’m not sure Mummy knows about, but I’m not going to be a spoilsport) and will soon be filled with pixie dust and other tiny objects in order to attract a real live fairy to come and live in it. 

While construction work is proceeding, we’re keeping Boots out of the room in disgrace. Last night he leapt over the dog gate and ate Tinkerbell. Izzy’s hoping the fairy that inhabits her new box will be Vidia, because she says it’s her favourite. 

I looked Vidia up in Wikipedia. She has pouty lips and arched eyebrows. She is also selfish, with a secret box of fairy dust under her bed which she hides from the other fairies, which explains why Izzy has suddenly acquired one too, in which she keeps a collection of birthday cards, broken dolls and old yoghurt pots. 

Vidia is self-centred, calls everyone “darling” and believes that not all fairies are created equal. Izzy says she likes her because she flies the fastest and has purple bits in her hair.  She is the Joan Collins of fairies, and I’m not sure I want Vidia living in my house, even if she’s hidden under Izzy’s bed – she reminds me of my ex-wife.

Russell Brand: a very trivial man?

Last Wednesday in a Newsnight interview, Russell Brand told a bemused Jeremy Paxman: “David Cameron says profit is not a dirty word; I say profit is a filthy word, because wherever there is profit there is also deficit”. 

He is absolutely right, of course. Back in 2007, you wouldn’t believe what Mr Brand was paid to present a television series called Russell Brand’s Ponderland. That was one stonking profit to Mr Brand, while the balancing deficit was incurred by me and hundreds of thousands of other disappointed viewers who switched off during the first episode. 25 wasted minutes stolen from our lives, never to be repaid. And not a single laugh in the bank. 

Winding back the BBC clock

Why did Lucy Adams, the BBC’s confounded and derided HR boss, wear spectacles glued to her scalp whilst being grilled by MPs? Does she have two extra eyes in her head, through which she can seek divine inspiration from the gods of HR? 

She certainly demonstrated something that I’ve always suspected: the pointlessness of her profession.

Warming up the Hot Seat

On my desk are three folders. 

A red one contains notes from briefings with broadcasters. “Different, exciting, edgy and out-of-the-box” – that’s what they all want. Of course, some of you who watch a bit of television may have detected a disconnect between this and what actually appears on our screens. “Dull, derivative, predictable, safe,” I hear you scream, “if I see another property show or a cookery programme, or a documentary about children with two heads, I’m going to throw my TV away.” 

I can’t possibly comment. You judge the effectiveness of our current commissioning system in delivering cutting-edge television to your homes; I just write down what they say they need on a piece of paper and pop it in the red folder.

The BBC: Turning A Crisis Into A Catastrophe

[The director-general of the BBC, George Entwistle, has resigned after a chaotic 54 days.]

Poor George. Such a charming, gentle man. 

I met him a few times, when he was head of Current Affairs at the BBC and I was pitching a television series about how to improve the rate of prisoner reoffending. What I proposed was so radical and dangerous (I wanted to move young prisoners to a “half-way house”, set them up in business, then film how they got on) that I doubted he would consider it. 

George heard the pitch, then said, in quiet, measured tones: “It’s exactly the sort of series the BBC should be doing right now”.

Launching The App

Tonight at 8 o’clock you can join a revolution.

No need to wave a flag or march in the streets; it requires no effort or cost. You can do it from the comfort of your own armchair, while you are simply watching television. For this evening, during Channel 4’s award-winning Dispatches programme, you can join thousands of others whose viewing habits are about to be transformed by an innovation created right here in Newcastle.

Anyone with an iPhone, Android smartphone, or even an iPad – can download the free Dispatches app and, as if by magic, your phone will link to your television screen during the programme and a wealth of additional content will flow straight to your device.

When a topic is mentioned in the documentary, your phone will vibrate and ping, and bespoke graphics, maps and other useful stuff just appear. You can save or share the content with your friends and simultaneously join the Twitter feeds directly related to the programme. You’ll be able to take part in live voting and download reports.

What you’ll be enjoying is the world’s first live interactive television “second screen” experience. So why do television viewers need this extra distraction? Isn’t it enough to simply watch the programme?

Well, the sad fact is that most of us don’t. Recent research suggests that nearly three-quarters of viewers are distracted by mobile devices while they watch the box, usually by tweeting or texting (often about the programme’s content), or keeping up with “friends” on Facebook. Now broadcasters want to fight back and harness these straying eyes within the programme experience. That’s where “second screen” comes in.

I met Paul Rawlings a couple of years ago. He is, by his own admission, a geek. He is also a genius. He’d started a business called ScreenReach Interactive with private funds. Paul had invented a technology called Screach, which is effectively a new computer language that can link mobile phones with screens on mobile advertising sites, or events, such as football matches or exhibitions.

They experimented with the crowd at St James Park, inviting them (and the listeners of Real Radio) to vote for the game’s Man of the Match. The system worked well. Paul, his business partner Sam Morton and their chairman Tom Maxfield, invited me to join the board and I soon realised their incredible technology offered a possible solution for the broadcaster. If you can provide viewers with sufficiently engrossing and relevant material on their mobile phones, played out to them live as a programme was being broadcast, you could keep everyone hooked on both screens. It was certainly worth a try.

It’s taken a year to develop, and eventually, despite competition from other technologies throughout the world, I sold the concept to Channel 4, who commissioned our production company Standing Stone to make a pilot using the Screach platform.

Since then Paul and I have spent the last 6 months co-developing the Dispatches app for the network, which his technical team built and our creatives are filling with rich, interesting content. It launched last week to critical acclaim and tonight will be its first big test. Channel 4’s ambition for second screen matches our own, and it’s probably significant that the person in charge of the project at the network, Vicky Taylor, also comes from Newcastle: she has believed in us from the outset, and as a result our offices in Byker are now buzzing with creativity and optimism.

This is a north-east success story in the making. But first the revolution has to take off. So please do go to the App Store and download the Dispatches app, then tune into Channel 4 and watch the programme tonight.

This week’s subject is incredibly moving: it’s about a brave man called Tony Nicklinson who, following a terrible stroke, has locked-in syndrome and is fighting the government for a right to die. It raises huge moral questions, which is why we hope many viewers will use the app to vote and comment on the issues. If you have a smartphone, please do join them.

If I Were Jeremy Hunt

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at a conference in Salford where our esteemed Secretary of State for Culture and Media gave the opening keynote address. I was booked to reply the following day in a panel session called “If I Were Jeremy Hunt…”

You have to hand it to Hunt: he’s is a tough act to follow. The packed audience of hardened television and radio professionals rather warmed to his wit and assured confidence. Standing centre stage and tieless in a dark suit (it was a media conference, after all), he spoke without notes or autocue, demonstrating the superior, charming, permasmiled demeanour that can only have derived from a proper boarding school education.  Head boy at Charterhouse School (fees £30,534 per annum), first class degree in PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, president of the university’s Conservative Association, he's the perfect Tory politician. Before last week’s revelations many spoke of him as Cameron’s natural successor.

The audience in Salford were left in no doubt about Hunt’s unerring conviction that, like the rest of Cameron’s cabinet, he is absolutely right about everything he says. He and his colleagues clearly believe that government policy shouldn't be influenced by people who know what they are talking about: industry experts or doctors or the armed forces, or, God forbid, the lifetime's experience of a cabinet minister’s own civil servants.

Being something of an expert myself – if working within the television industry for 40 years counts as accreditation – I felt justified in disagreeing with some of Hunt's policies, particularly his crazy initiative for local television. This was a man whose first task in Government was to tear up Trinity Mirror's fairly won pilot contract to supply a groundbreaking multi-media news service here in the north east of England and replace it with his own barmy plan to hand out television channels to a load of community groups who are bound to go bust in the process.  Trinity Mirror is, of course, the newspaper group that is Murdoch's biggest competitor in the UK.  A coincidence, I'm sure.

Of course the views of people who could be expected to know what they are talking about have never really been taken into consideration when formulating any of this government's policies, which is why most of them are lying in tatters: instead, the cabinet have relied on “special advisers”, and the tittle-tattle of their exclusive clubs and cocktail parties. This is a government that listens to no one but themselves.

The head of a very large media organisation, who is not called Murdoch, recently told me that their senior editorial team was invited to tea at Downing Street for an informal “consultation”, but ended up listening, sandwich-less, to Dave hectoring them for an hour about his plans. Not one of them was asked a single question.

Back in Salford, I’d written myself quite a formal speech in response to Hunt's comments but, having seen the master in action, I stood in the centre of the stage, took it out of my jacket pocket and quietly ripped it to shreds.  This, I think, got me brownie points and quite a few laughs, after which I attempted to restore some balance to the debate about the future of media in our country. I knew exactly what I’d do if I were Jeremy Hunt, and I told them.  Wasting time on hyperlocal television stations wasn't part of my proposed agenda as the next Secretary of State;  listening to the industry and the viewers most definitely was.

But I confess I was utterly upstaged by the wonderful veteran journalist Gillian Reynolds, who rose to her feet and performed a glorious parody of Hunt himself: she portrayed a man who loves himself more than he’ll ever love the electorate, preening, smiling, perfect, who neither cares nor understands the common man, a professional politician who, like all his cronies in this Coalition, is utterly out of touch with reality. She brought the house down.

What a contrast to see him in the House of Commons last Wednesday: embarrassed, halting, his head buried nervously in a carefully constructed statement, Cameron and Osborne squirming uncomfortably behind him. Here was their own firewall self-combusting in front of them, caught out by his deviously fawning “special adviser” and his own closeness to the Murdoch dynasty, any pretence of “quasi-judicial” impartiality utterly busted.

I guess he’ll try to wriggle out of it to the very end, but I know what I would do right now if I were Jeremy Hunt: I'd resign.

Ratings Wars

[Last night the BBC's new talent show The Voice went up against the ITV juggernaut Britain's Got Talent.  Was it one reality show too far?]

Well, who would have thought Britain had so much talent? Saturday evening has been turned into the long night of the wannabe.

This morning the TV trade press (Broadcast Magazine) announced that Britain’s Got Talent had “triumphed” over the BBC’s new talent show The Voice. Nothing could be further from the truth, for during the 20 minutes period that the two shows went head to head, the BBC actually won convincingly, by nine million to ITV’s six and a half, even though the average ratings for the whole of Britain’s Got Talent were rather higher.

Take it from me (as one who has spent quite a portion of his career supplying shows to the BBC for the traditional Saturday night battle), getting nine million to switch on (and stay watching) your first show is a more than a success, it’s a barnstorming, miraculous, champagne-popping triumph. I can’t recall another debut that came anywhere close: even shows that have gone on to become hits, like Strictly Come Dancing, had less than 5 million on their first airing.

But despite this talk of ratings wars (and I promise, Britain’s press will be full of it for the next two months, so we’d better get used to it), this wasn’t a battle of equals at all. In fact, when most of us thought the talent show market had been saturated, both networks managed to come up with surprising twists on the tired old genre.

The Voice really is what it says on the tin. Four judges sit with their backs to the singers, so the contestants perform in front of four impenetrable chair backs, willing them to swing round before they finish their performance. Influenced neither by looks nor backstory, the judges’ decision is based solely on the voice they hear. If a judge does turn to face a contestant, then that judge becomes their coach for the rest of the series.

Several failed: Phil the delivery driver with his grey-haired Nan sobbing in the wings, who undoubtedly would have had the Britain’s Got Talent judges begging for more, went home emptyhanded.

But where it gets clever is that when two or more judges pick the same person, then, for the first time I’ve ever seen in a talent show, all the power goes to the contestant. Several singers were chosen by all four celebrity judges, who then turned into groveling lackeys as they tried to woo the candidate to join their team. It was like watching real recording industry pitches: they promised the earth – world tours and endless riches; they name dropped without shame (producer and rapper will.i.am mentioned “Mike” Jackson every third sentence, whilst Tom Jones dragged up an anecdote about Elvis). Meanwhile the wannabe, who frankly would have been quite happy with just another glass of beer in the BBC green room, had to pick a judge to entrust with their future. My favourite moment was when one candidate completely turned the tables by putting in an X Factor-long pause in the middle of the announcement of his choice, throwing judges, audience and even the TV producers, into confusion.

What was strange about The Voice, though, was that in a typically BBC way, they only featured attractive, young contestants in the first show – thereby losing the drama of the judges turning round and facing a Susan Boyle. This is a format designed for a disconnect between vocal ability and looks, yet they haven’t exploited it - yet.

Not so Britain’s Got Talent. Incredibly, they found themselves another Boyle in an extremely large teenager called Jonathan, who sings like an operatic angel, albeit with an underwhelming though more attractive girl singer called Charlotte. I wonder how many weeks it will take for Simon Cowell to split them up and give Charlotte the boot. Jonathan is a star in the making.

But the real hit of BGT was David Walliams. He and Cowell are the new Morecambe and Wise. I have never seen Cowell look more uncomfortable and edgy (and, as a consequence, perform better) as Walliams ribbed him mercilessly. That relationship alone is enough to turn me into a Saturday night couch potato.

Hunt's Folly

The entire audience was hushed: the play had reached its climax. Suddenly the silence was pierced by a lone shrill voice: “Daddy, I want a wee-wee”. Izzy was enjoying her first live theatre show.

Northern Stage’s slick, fun production of “Shhh…A Christmas Story” managed to hold an audience of toddlers spellbound for well over an hour. Izzy’s eyes lit up from the moment she saw the lights, moving scenery and jolly actors.

She sat transfixed, apart from one unscripted moment when, fascinated by some prop snowballs that had been flying around the stage, she ignored our pleas to sit down and strode onstage to retrieve one for herself. The actors merely paused, watched her walk round them, and then carried on. I’d love to have a video of that precious moment.

I guess that’s the sort of home video that will be the mainstay of Jeremy Hunt’s new local television plans. I can’t imagine what else we’ll be watching. Last week the Secretary of State announced that Newcastle had been chosen as one of the first “pioneer” cities to be awarded licences for local stations. Quite why he thinks there’s any demand for this in Newcastle is beyond me. None of the people who are capable of making local television work have agreed to get involved. Perhaps some wannabes have been seduced by the lure of showbusiness. They are about to get a rude awakening.

Jeremy Hunt’s plans are based on his mistaken belief that if cities like Birmingham, Alabama have their own thriving local television stations, then so should Birmingham, West Midlands. And Newcastle, Tyne and Wear. Evidently our Secretary of State doesn’t know how American television actually works. Over there all the successful local stations, which do have strong local news outputs, are owned by or affiliated to the main networks, which supply them with expensive and highly profitable primetime programming. Every big city has at least 5 local stations, carrying shows like Dancing With the Stars and the X-Factor. They transmit network daytime shows and high budget “syndicated” talk shows. They also carry local news in the morning, early evening and late night.

Sounds familiar? We’ve actually had that system in the UK since the 1950s. It’s called ITV. Until it was systematically ruined by Thatcher’s disastrous reforms, we had good local programmes through our own Tyne Tees Television, which also carried all the hits of the ITV network. Sure, it was regional, not local, but at least it gave our area a sense of identity, was independently owned, and supplied us with quality regional news.

In 2010 the Labour government tried to turn regional into local, by creating a local news pilot scheme. The concept was simple, and probably economically sound: give the ITV regional news to new local providers to create an integrated operation working on a regional, local and hyper-local level. In the North East, the licence was won by a consortium that included the daily newspaper I write a column for: The Journal. The newspaper’s newsroom would have become multi-media, enabling users to enjoy not only better regional news on ITV, but also enjoyed layers of information in print, on the web and on your mobile phone – you could even type your postcode into a computer and find information about your own community.

It was a 21st century solution that would also have been sustainable. As in America, network shows would have driven audiences to the regional output; just two commercial breaks around the regional news would have funded most of the cost and the service would have been built around a proven and profitable newsgathering operation. Good journalism requires investment, training, rigour and professionalism. You are reading the proof of this right now. Sadly, Jeremy Hunt stubbornly axed this bold experiment and replaced it with his own harebrained, old-fashioned plan for local stations.

I can’t imagine a single advertiser supporting an amateur station with cheap low-quality videos. Shots of Izzy running onstage to collect snowballs may be fun viewing for me, but it’s hardly going to compete with Strictly Come Dancing, is it? Without expertise, viewers or advertisers, Hunt’s Folly is bound to fail.

A Campaign For Live Television

For two weeks, Channel 4’s daytime gameshow Deal or No Deal is broadcasting live for the first time in its history. As a result, it’s audience has increased substantially.

I’m not surprised: viewers can really sense the tension and peril of live television. So much of what we watch these days is manufactured, edited and homogenized. From reality shows to talent competitions, producers do their best to artificially inject tension and jeopardy into the safely pre-recorded mix, but it’s rarely convincing. There’s something about the security of recording that saps suspense, and I’m sure our relentlessly vacuous daytime output really benefited from the thrill of potential disaster. Noel Edmonds, probably the best live entertainment presenter Britain has ever had, is the ideal host for the experiment.

As a producer, nothing quite matches the thrill of live TV. For the first dozen years of my career, I was a studio director, sitting in a darkened control room facing banks of monitors, calling the shots and trying to hold it all together. All too often the fragile bubble burst and the show descended into chaos.

That embarrassing episode of Panorama, where David Dimbleby sits alone in front of a solitary camera with nothing to say for 11 minutes because the film has broken down? That was me at the end of the telephone helpfully telling him to “just keep talking”. That live Nationwide episode when a lady judge keeled over in a dying faint and the presenter just stepped over her recumbent body? I was directing that night, too. Grace Jones hitting Russell Harty? It was my voice in his earpiece, foolishly telling him to ignore her.

Yet the more things go wrong, the more audiences seems to enjoy it. It makes the viewing experience somehow more real and the viewers more connected.

Nowadays viewers can turn even pre-recorded programmes into live viewing experiences by texting or tweeting their friends with comments about the content. I reckon that around 80% of all young people use phones or iPads while they are watching television, often to communicate with each other about what they’re watching. Channel 4 News positively encourages viewers to debate the issues on the programme using Twitter.

Next Wednesday I’ll be speaking at a conference in Leeds about “second screen technology”, where viewers will be able to have a live, parallel, two-way experience with a television programme, using their mobile phones. I guarantee it’s the next big thing for our industry, and I’m proud that our Newcastle-based company, ScreenReach, has developed world-beating technology to facilitate it.

The problem is, actual live television, what we in the trade call “event” television, still costs a great deal of money. Now that high definition cameras and cheap editing software are on sale in any high street electronics store, anyone can become a television producer. Yet it still takes guts and a very large outside broadcast unit to go live.

I do hope that, following the publication of its long-awaited strategy review “Delivering Quality First”, the BBC remembers to include plenty of live shows for the nation to enjoy. Most of its other recommendations seem pretty spot on.

I would say that, though, wouldn’t I? In January I gave a speech at a media conference where I proposed five key changes for the BBC. These were: move BBC Three to Salford; replace original daytime programming on BBC2 with repeats; transfer childrens programmes from BBC1 to CBBC; use BBC3 and BBC4 as experimental feeder networks for BBC1 and BBC2; and reduce the evening output of BBC local radio, which almost nobody listens to.

I’m pleased to say that all these suggestions are now BBC policy. I hasten to add that this is not because I had any influence whatsoever, but because they are blindingly obvious solutions to the BBC’s economic plight. I’m now regretting I didn’t add a request to preserve risk-taking through live programmes. As the darkest phase of this recession starts to bite, we need more laughs. And what better way achieve that than to encourage television producers, presenters and performers to make fools of themselves for us, live in our own living rooms.

Red Or Black?

Yesterday a second woman-beating rat crawled out of the rotting timbers of the sinking ship called Red Or Black? Are we surprised?

Well I, for one, am amazed. Having produced television entertainment most of my professional life, I am finding it hard to believe that Simon Cowell’s company could break a cardinal rule of the gameshow: that all participants must be thoroughly checked. “Backgrounds, psychs and meds”, we call them.

Background checks are simple and cheap. For less than £50, you can find out if someone has a record with the Criminal Records Bureau. Producers automatically exclude those who do because they don’t want to traumatise their victims, or give the press a scandal that might damage the reputation of the show. As the revelations of the last few days demonstrate, the damage tarnishes not just the programme, but the network itself.

I’m astonished that Nathan Hageman, who was awarded £1million at the end of the first episode, wasn’t weeded out at the first hurdle. He had been jailed for five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend, and his criminal record sits in public view for life. For £50, the broadcaster would have known not to put him on the screen at all, let alone make him a millionaire.

The “psych” test costs more, but is essential for any programme offering a big cash prize. Contestants sit for a good hour with a psychologist, who is tasked with uncovering emotional and mental flaws. This not only reassures the producer that the player can cope with the pressures of winning or losing, but also protects other contestants and programme staff. What if an aggrieved loser were to attack Ant and Dec? Anyone with the slightest hint of aggression is automatically excluded, which makes Mr Hageman’s appearance even more extraordinary. In America, the mere threat of violence whispered off-camera by a reality contestant would lead to instant disqualification.

In physical game shows or reality series like Big Brother, many other contestants fall at the medical. When I produced America’s Paradise Hotel, around 40% of the applicants were rejected at the “med” stage, most for sexually transmitted diseases – a sad indictment of our youth.

Meanwhile, as Cowell’s show’s ratings declined as fast as his reputation, derision and hostility have been thrown from all sides of the critical spectrum, even from the normally pliant industry trade press. In this week’s Broadcast magazine, the editor Lisa Campbell writes a blistering editorial headlined “How Cowell ran out of luck”. She lambasts the show: “the premise should have set alarm bells ringing at ITV about Cowell’s understanding of, and aptitude for, gameshows… try as they might, no amount of sob stories, weepy phone calls or stirring strings are going to make a viewer invest anything in a bunch of strangers whose choices display an utter lack of skill, effort or reasoning.”

Campbell’s view is echoed across the industry, and it’s easy to see why. For the format of Red Or Black? breaks another gameshow rule: that winners must be “worthy”.

Whether it’s a talent contest, a quiz, or an action gameshow, the prize must always be deserved. Contestants can demonstrate “worthiness” in a number of ways: by answering difficult questions, or performing complex or dangerous tasks; by bravely risking what they’ve won so far to gain more; or by generating sympathy from the viewers who follow them on their perilous journey.

Red or Black? offered none of these. Supposedly based on the story of Ashley Revell, a professional gambler from Kent, who bet all his possessions, including his clothes, on a single spin of the roulette wheel, these contestants invested nothing to win their prize. It is simply a game of greed and chance, nothing more. Thankfully the programme’s viewers, who are a lot cleverer than producers sometimes give them credit, saw right through it.

Cutting The Beeb Down To Size

I recently found myself in a vast empty office building near Manchester, as one of the first guests of a new BBC empire. The signs weren’t up, painters were still glossing the skirting boards, men in overalls were wandering round with clipboards, and a few early staff arrivals were looking for the Costa Coffee shop. Everything smelt new and optimistic.

It’s an impressive development: towering glassfronted buildings and a fully equipped studio complex overlook the calming waters of Salford Quays. Several BBC departments are moving there, including Sport, Children’s, and a chunk of news output including Radio 5 Live and the BBC Breakfast programme. It’s a nice gesture by a London-centric organisation, although it probably won’t make much difference to us independent producers isolated in the North East.

The building was freezing, not just because it was in Manchester, but because noone had yet worked out how to turn down the air-conditioning. For the cluster of young, ambitious creatives it must be an exciting new world. Yet amongst the new arrivals I met there was talk of only one thing: the cuts. ‘Delivering Quality First’ is the catchphrase – how can the BBC maintain its programme quality whilst slashing 20% of its budget?

Nobody knows how this target will be achieved: advice has been solicited from all and sundry, and decisions are expected soon. Over the last few days, media pages have buzzed with rumour and yesterday the new Chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, hinted that some sports coverage and maybe a whole television channel might be at risk. We already know that over 1,000 jobs are vulnerable within News, so two Salford departments could be losing staff even before they’ve unpacked their suitcases.

According to Lord Patten, the World Service is safe. So that’s a relief then: people in India will still get their BBC programmes, even if we can’t watch Match of the Day.

The thing about Delivering Quality First is that it’s hard to define “quality”. Is it entertainment for millions of families to enjoy on a Saturday night? Or a concert on Radio Three, heard by just a couple of thousand? The influence and volubility of the Radio 3 audience is in inverse proportion to its size, so it would be a very brave executive that tries to cut so much as a single cello from a BBC orchestra.

The thing that I find strange is the way this exercise has been undertaken. Despite the cuts, the BBC has a guaranteed income of many billions for the next six years. With such a level of risk-free financial security, most business leaders would start with a blank sheet of paper and first work out what sort of service its customers would expect for the money, and then cost and deliver it. The current strategy is to ask how the existing BBC can deliver the best of what it already does, more cheaply.

Rather than “Should we be keeping BBC 4 as well as BBC 2”, wouldn’t it have made more sense to ask: “What is the public’s demand for factual programmes, and how best can we meet it?” I find it odd that we have daytime programmes with miniscule budgets on two separate channels, and yet thousands of great programmes lie unrepeated in the BBC Archive – I know which I’d rather watch on a wet afternoon. I also don’t understand why the BBC spends hundreds of millions on a separate channel for 16 to 24 year olds, most of whom don’t see the relevance of television in their tweeting, texting lives.

Consensus will be impossible. I just hope that, when the white smoke comes from White City, and the decisions are announced, the BBC remembers that it’s a broadcaster for the whole nation. Whatever cuts it makes, it must continue its commitment to the North: starting with that empty building in Salford.

Don't Scare The Turkey

The hare is dead: frankly, it never looked very alive to me.

The news that BBC1 has decided to axe its infantile game show “Don’t Scare The Hare” after just three disastrous and expensive episodes must come as no surprise to anyone who has actually seen it: which isn’t many (the ratings have plumbed new depths for Saturday night viewing).

For those who haven’t, it’s a show with dubbed laughter, a strange and superfluous music track, a scary presenter with giant glasses and a cap hiding his baldness, and an animatronic hare which trundles around the studio like a dalek. Grownups play children’s games and if they fail, the hare runs off “scared”. Oh, and someone wins some money.

Wow: somebody actually sat in a darkened room and came up with this drivel, and the BBC paid them a couple of million quid to stage it. It looks like cheap Bulgarian children’s television. Suspecting that it was designed for two-year-olds, we tried it out on Izzy. She didn’t last twenty seconds, angrily demanding we switch to Peppa Pig. The BBC clearly cast the wrong animal in the lead – it should have been a turkey.

Mind you, all producers have made them: turkeys, that is. When Mark Thompson quit the BBC as director of programmes, at his leaving do he gave a speech about his career highs and lows. Robot Wars, which I produced when he was running BBC2, was a high; but the lowest of the lows was a Saturday night game show called Happy Families.

It seemed like a great idea at the time: Gladiators had just completed its first series on ITV, and arena shows seemed to be the in thing. So, rather than lycra-clad superheroes with false names like Jet and Wolf, I came up with a show that pitched extended families against each other. We staged it at the London Arena: a barn of a place so big we had to build giant games to fill it. In the middle were two metal cages in which the contestants imprisoned their grandmothers. The contestants had to “Hoist up their Grannies” a hundred feet to the top of the building. Yes, I was responsible for this nonsense.

The show opened in the roof, with a giant roller coaster made up of hand-powered bikes. One by one each family member pedalled furiously to link up with the others into one long hand-powered train, which began a terrifying descent to the ground, hitting more than 40 miles an hour on the bends with no safety net. I was scared that we might dump an entire family onto the heads of the audience. Sometimes the bikes got stuck and the contestants were suspended in mid-air: one woman broke her arm on the pedals. We also built absurd games like “Terrorball”, in which someone had to answer trivia questions about their family while being spun upside down. There was even a game for the family dog.

I was terrified one of the grannies would suffer a heart attack. In fact, the biggest problem was incontinence: you wouldn’t believe how many times they needed to go to the toilet during filming. Each time the wretched cage had to be slowly winched down so they could be released. We went wildly over schedule, frequently filming into the night, by which time the audience – all 5,000 of them, had drifted off home. So instead of a mass spectacle, we had to shoot everything in close-up and cut in shots of audience cheering from the afternoon.

Right now I feel the pain of Don’t Scare The Hare’s producer. After so much effort, realising you’ve created a turkey is no fun. But at least the hare won’t be lonely, as it lies buried in the Saturday night television graveyard: it will have two granny cages and a load of rusty hand-pedalled bikes for company.

And Now The Good News

The conference in Salford, near Manchester, was about the future of regional broadcasting. An appropriately timed event, for on Wednesday our esteemed, if sometimes mispronounced, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced his proposals for local TV. A new network, with a dozen or more stations located in major cities opting out for two hours a day: not quite the vision in the Conservative election manifesto, of 80 multi-media city stations, but it’s better than no local coverage at all. Or is it?

“News 3” should have gone on air a few days ago: supplying not only ITV’s regional news here in the North East, but England’s first totally integrated local news operation. The journalists on our regional daily newspapers, The Journal and the Evening Chronicle, would have worked alongside experienced television colleagues on an integrated, layered, truly local news operation in print, radio, television and online.

Sadly we’ll never know if our Independently Financed News Consortium, of which I was proud to have been part, would have been successful. It was a groundbreaking concept but, because it was subsidised by the BBC licence fee, Mr Hunt cancelled it.

Now he’s proposing Channel Six, a network dedicated to the provision of local news and content – and subsidised by the BBC licence fee. Independent companies based in a dozen regional cities, using a central hub of network programming, with a couple of hours of local opt-outs? Sounds familiar? Of course: it’s exactly what your local ITV station was set up to be.

I remember Tyne Tees Television when it launched on Channel 8, fifty two years ago this month: the medley of local folk songs which started the broadcasting day, from Bobby Shafto to the Blaydon Races; “Wacky Jacky” Haig in the One O’Clock Show; those terrible local shopping commercials; and Tom Coyne on the well resourced local news.

The first seeds of destruction of ITV as a regional provider were sown in 1991 by the Conservative government. Now that demolition is complete, how ironic it is that a Conservative minister is trying to resurrect a similar model. Will it work? Well there’s a big difference this time: there’s no money.

The teams of professional journalists will be supplemented, or supplanted, by enthusiastic amateurs – community producers, without training in scriptwriting skills, the basic principles of libel, or even the mystic art of how to entertain mass audiences. The cost of a libel writ, or defending a referral to Ofcom, is huge, yet the stations’ budgets will be minuscule: a fraction of what the broadcasters currently spend on their regional news. And they expect us to watch, or log in, simply because it’s local? I think not.

Britain is proud of quality journalism, and this takes training, resources and commitment. Quality is derived from the skills of many lifetimes of professional experience and that doesn’t come cheap. However local Channel 6 aims to be, it will fail unless it gets the proper funding our journalists and communities deserve.